From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju@...>
Date: 2002-01-21T14:01:59+09:00
Subject: Re: Hello! Array sub classing?


On Mon, 21 Jan 2002, Markt wrote:
> They have to be there... somewhere... implied as part of a deeper method
> or invisible, private to the class.
> Since the data is stored, there has to be a delimiter.
> Hmm.. OK... maybe not... could be just a bunch of pointers....

A Ruby value can only be one of these:

  special values: nil, false and true.
  small integers (FixNum)
  identifiers (Symbol)
  pointers (to allocated objects)

And in an Array you can only put Ruby values. There are no gimmicks. When
you call String#split, the result is an array of pointers to string
objects (shortcut: we say: an array of strings)

> Then again, when a string contains commas, it can be treated as a set of
> elements...

a string is constructed mostly like an array; one exception is that
instead of being ruby values, its elements are 0-255 numbers, assumed to
be ascii codes. another exception is that several common methods still
don't behave the same way. for example, the for-loop (#each) on an array
goes element by element, but the for-loop on a string goes by spans of
characters (the default is line-by-line).

________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard                   http://hostname.2y.net/~matju